On 11 February 2024, during Super Bowl LVIII, Beyoncé stepped out of a Verizon commercial alongside Tony Hale and surprise-released two singles that would reshape the cultural landscape of American music. “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” were not genre experiments by a pop superstar testing new waters. They were acts of reclamation – a deliberate assertion that country music belongs to Black artists as much as anyone, and that the genre’s whitewashed mythology had endured long enough.
The announcement came via Instagram: a teaser showing a woman starting a car with a licence plate reading “Texas Hold ‘Em”, driving past a group of men gawking at a Beyoncé billboard. The date “Act II, 3.29” signalled the second instalment of the Renaissance trilogy that had begun with Renaissance in 2022. Within weeks, both tracks would dismantle assumptions about who gets to make country music, who gets played on country radio, and whose history the genre chooses to remember.
The Songs Themselves
“Texas Hold ‘Em” is an uptempo country pop, western, and soul track built around a rapid-plucked banjo and acoustic guitar introduction that moves into a stomping beat. Co-written with Raphael Saadiq, Nathan Ferraro, Elizabeth Lowell Boland, Atia Boggs, and Megan Bülow, it operates simultaneously as a playful hoedown and a serious piece of musical archaeology. “This ain’t Texas / Ain’t no hold ’em / So lay your cards down,” Beyoncé croons, before declaring, “I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with you / Come pour some sugar on me, honey too.”
The banjo is played by Rhiannon Giddens, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient and one of the most important living scholars of American roots music. Giddens has spent decades educating audiences about the banjo’s origins as a Black instrument, brought from Africa to the Caribbean and on to the United States, before being appropriated into the white country canon. As Giddens wrote after the release: “My only hope is that it might lead a few more intrepid folks into the exciting history of the banjo. I used to say many times as soon as Beyoncé puts the banjo on a track my job is done. Well, I didn’t expect the banjo to be mine.”
“16 Carriages” occupies different terrain. A slower, more reflective country stomp punctuated by pedal steel and organ, it charts Beyoncé’s journey from her mid-teens – when Destiny’s Child signed with Columbia Records – to the present. “Sixteen carriages drivin’ away / While I watch them ride with my dreams away / To the summer sunset on a holy night / On a long back road, all the tears I fight,” she sings. The steel guitar is performed by Robert Randolph, another Black roots musician whose presence reinforces the album’s thesis about who built country music.
Chart History and Firsts
The commercial performance of “Texas Hold ‘Em” was historically unprecedented. The song debuted at number one on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, making Beyoncé the first Black woman to reach that position. She became the first Black artist to top both the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs simultaneously – a feat we examined in depth. In the UK, the single reached number one on the Official Singles Chart, where it remained for five non-consecutive weeks, making Beyoncé the first artist ever to score a UK chart double with a country album and a country single simultaneously. The Official Charts Company confirmed that “Texas Hold ‘Em” was the first female solo country song to reach number one in the UK since the chart’s inception.
In the United States, the song topped the Billboard Global 200, making it the first country song to do so since that chart launched in 2020. It simultaneously charted across Pop, Hot AC, AC, Country, Rhythmic, Hip Hop, R&B, and Triple A radio formats – the first song in music history to achieve that feat. According to Billboard, Beyoncé became the first Black female artist to send a country song to the top of Apple Music’s country chart. The song’s first week generated 19.2 million streams, 4.8 million in airplay audience, and 39,000 downloads.
The Gatekeeping Moment
The controversy that accompanied the release exposed the racial fault lines running through country music’s infrastructure. On 13 February 2024, a listener requested that Oklahoma S.C.O.R.E. country station KYKC play “Texas Hold ‘Em”. General manager Roger Harris replied: “We do not play Beyoncé on KYKC as we are a country music station.” The response went viral on social media, with the hashtag #Beyonceiscountry trending on Twitter. Fans flooded the station with requests. After adding the song to rotation, a S.C.O.R.E. representative told media that the station had been unaware the track had a country sound until staff members heard it.
The incident was not isolated. In its first 24 hours, only eight out of 150 radio stations considered for Country Airplay played the song, according to Billboard. A petition attributing this resistance to “racism, revisionist history, and gatekeeping” attracted over 28,000 signatures. Columbia Records did not initially respond to requests for comment. After the backlash, CMT added the song to its streaming stations, and Columbia serviced the track to country radio.
The debate forced a reckoning with a paradox at the heart of country music: the genre’s foundational instruments and structures – the banjo, the blues, the call-and-response vocal traditions – originated with Black musicians. As author and country songwriter Alice Randall told The Washington Post: “Beyoncé is spotlighting and building on a profound tradition” that began with Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Randall, the first Black woman to write a number-one country song, added: “She is going to take it even further if the things she’s already done in country is any indication.”
Cowboy Carter: The Album
The full album, titled Cowboy Carter, was released on 29 March 2024. It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, making Beyoncé the first Black artist to top that chart with a country album. In the US, it opened atop the Billboard 200 with over 400,000 album-equivalent units in its first week. The project featured contributions from Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Miley Cyrus, Post Malone, and Shaboozey, whose single “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” – released from the album’s sessions – later topped the Hot Country Songs chart for multiple weeks.
Beyoncé told GQ in September 2024: “I was so hyped to see a song like ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ gain worldwide acceptance. Even more exciting was how it helped reinvigorate the country genre across music, fashion, art, and culture, and introduced the world to so much great talent like Shaboozey, Tanner Adell, Willie Jones, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts.”
The ripple effects were measurable. Black female country musicians saw dramatic increases in streams: Reyna Roberts experienced a 250% surge, Tanner Adell 188%, K. Michelle 185%, and Rissi Palmer 110%. Linda Martell, the first commercially successful Black female country artist, saw a 275% increase. Black-led organisations such as the Black Opry reported significant follower growth. NPR’s Amanda Marie Martínez wrote that the song revealed a “strong demand” for country music made by Black artists that the industry had systematically ignored.
The Country Establishment Responds
The response from established country artists was largely welcoming, though not unanimous. Dolly Parton praised Beyoncé as “fantastic and beautiful” and posted on social media: “I’m a big fan of Beyoncé and very excited that she’s done a country album. So congratulations on your Billboard Hot Country number one single. Can’t wait to hear the full album!” Lainey Wilson told Billboard: “I love it. The more the merrier. Country music is about storytelling and Beyoncé knows how to tell a story.” Maren Morris described the song as “such a statement”, praising Beyoncé’s “reclaiming of country music back to Black people.”
Variety’s Chris Willman noted that Beyoncé’s approach was not “genre tourism” but a serious engagement with country music’s traditions, exercising her “natural right” to reach back into her roots as a Houston native who attended the Livestock Show and Rodeo annually throughout her childhood. The Guardian‘s Ben Beaumont-Thomas observed that the “rootsy and authentically country” arrangements demonstrated how the heartache, homilies, and drinking songs of the genre were “actually a great fit” for Beyoncé, whose skill at delivering both “wistful poetry and plainspoken sentiment” aligned naturally with country’s traditions. The broader cultural moment – in which genre boundaries were dissolving across the board – also shaped reception. As our coverage of the 2024 cultural landscape noted, audiences increasingly rejected rigid categorisation.
Rolling Stone and the Canon
Rolling Stone placed “Texas Hold ‘Em” at number 192 on its 2024 ranking of the 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time – a song released in February inscribed into the genre’s official history by year’s end. The Grammy nominations reinforced the point: “Texas Hold ‘Em” received nods for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Country Song at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards. The ASCAP Country Music Awards named it one of the Most Performed Country Songs of 2024. The BET Awards awarded it Viewer’s Choice. The BRIT Awards nominated it for Best International Song.
A Larger Reclamation
What Beyoncé accomplished with these two singles extends beyond chart positions. The songs forced a conversation about the racial politics of genre – about who is permitted to call themselves a country artist, whose ancestors built the musical vocabulary that Nashville commercialised, and how an industry rooted in Black blues, gospel, and folk traditions came to be perceived as an exclusively white cultural space.
As Andrea Williams wrote in The Nashville Tennessean, Black people are generally “shut out of country music’s creation” and have been “waiting for the opportunity to take part in the genre their forefathers helped build.” With “Texas Hold ‘Em”, Beyoncé proved that Black songwriters, producers, and musicians were, in Williams’s framing, “country enough.”
The song also boosted country radio’s accessibility. Brian Philips of Cumulus Media told Variety: “It adds a completely unforeseen, unimagined new angle to country radio. We have 55 major country stations and it’s very hard to get them to agree on anything. But everybody at country wants to play it.”
Two years on, Cowboy Carter established a template for how artists with the cultural capital and historical awareness to do so can intervene in genres that have been artificially segregated. Beyoncé did not ask permission from Nashville’s gatekeepers. She simply released music that was, by any honest measure, country – and let the charts, the audiences, and history render their verdict.
